https://framatube.org/w/97acbef0-dd05-45d4-a1df-c8ac9cbe36f0
And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia" and "hard
for new users to find it" problems. We would have to guess the first
steps to do about that...
And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia" and
"hard for new users to find it" problems.
I don't agree. Google has been doing that ever since they bought out
Deja News. Usenet Article Format and Usenet conventions are different
enough from Web pages that the search fails to parse the article in a
useful manner and the person performing the search doesn't get useful results. Conventional Usenet articles have extensive quoting that
confuse pattern matching, and plenty of users quote just differently
enough from other users that it's a mess.
Indeed, fighting spam and abuse is a daily challenge.
And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia"
and "hard
for new users to find it" problems.
Am 08.07.2023 um 09:42:23 Uhr schrieb Julien:
And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia" and
"hard for new users to find it" problems.
Getting new users means it must be findable via normal web searches.
Something like narkive.com, but with posting possible.
On the contrary, it is almost trivially easy. The only real problem
is that binary groups got some people upset right around the time
that broadband was exploding. While it can certainly be argued that
encoded multipart binaries are not the best way to deal with large
data files, the RFCs haven’t been updated in something like 25 years.
Consequently, neither have many of the clients, and that’s where 99%
of the work has to be done to support non-text messages.
Am 09.07.2023 um 14:40:20 Uhr schrieb Adam H. Kerman:
I don't agree. Google has been doing that ever since they bought out
Deja News. Usenet Article Format and Usenet conventions are different >>enough from Web pages that the search fails to parse the article in a >>useful manner and the person performing the search doesn't get useful >>results. Conventional Usenet articles have extensive quoting that
confuse pattern matching, and plenty of users quote just differently
enough from other users that it's a mess.
A web gateway could have threading, Google just didn't implement it.
If I look for content, I regularly get results from Google Groups and >narkive.com.
rocksolid is another software that has a news2web gateway.
Most internet users only know a web browser.
To find the Usenet, they need to find interesting information.
The next step is to make them using an NNTP software.
We already know what hasn't been attracting new users to Usenet.
Am 09.07.2023 um 15:37:50 Uhr schrieb Adam H. Kerman:
We already know what hasn't been attracting new users to Usenet.
I was one of them.
Without finding articles via narkive.com, I would never post here.
For your reference, records indicate that
=?UTF-8?Q?Julien_=c3=89LIE?= <iulius@nom-de-mon-site.com.invalid> wrote:
Indeed, fighting spam and abuse is a daily challenge.
Only inasmuch as people don’t *actually* want to take the steps needed to solve the problem. The UDP was a rare thing, but cutting off hostile networks should be one of the first steps in eliminating abuse.
Am 09.07.2023 um 14:29:59 Uhr schrieb Doc O'Leary ,:
On the contrary, it is almost trivially easy. The only real problem
is that binary groups got some people upset right around the time
that broadband was exploding.
Why do people feel disturbed by them?
They don't need to subscribe to them and news servers need to make sure
that binary attachments cannot be posted.
That's all.
In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that
are disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to
use it to their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and
destroyed it.
Kind of off topic, but it has been amusing to watch the saga of how the alternative have played out in a way that still did not benefit the
content creators. Musicians complain about the pennies they make from streaming. Writers and actors are both on strike now because Hollywood
I s being Hollywood. And the places providing porn are still under
attack from the morality police, as the woes of PornHub and others in
Utah and beyond are many. It almost makes it seem like the problem
never *was* Usenet at all! :-/
In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are >disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden
to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to use it to >their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and destroyed it.
Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> writes:
In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to
use it to their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and
destroyed it.
A caveat to this analysis is CSAM (child sexual abuse material). (And a
few related nonconsentual things like revenge porn and torture videos, but CSAM is the most obvious and straightforward to analyze.)
There
are indeed organized groups of peoople who are trying to trade CSAM and
will use your service to do it if you let them, and there's real abuse of real people underneath it.
But this one is worth
thinking about independently and figuring out how you are going to deal
with, because getting in the middle of that is really bad.
The problem certainly was never Usenet. Usenet has always been a bit of a backwater, and a lot of this stuff is indeed capitalist bullshit or
prudish nonsense. But Usenet is also not somehow immune from the more serious problems that do exist.
The absolute libertarian position is very tempting here. For a long time
I too was persuaded by it, and I think it does work up to a certain scale. But the world is very large and full of people and a tiny fraction of
those people want to do some seriously evil shit and will use your servers
to do it if you let them, and you do need to have some sort of plan to
stop them unless you are willing to support a type of social free-for-all that 99.99% of humanity is not going to be willing to tolerate.
According to Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com>:
In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are
disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden >to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to use it to >their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and destroyed it.
Hi, I've managed news servers since the 1980s. I never carried many of
the binary newsgoups for entirely practical reasons. They were (and
are) enormous which in the era of slow, often dialup, transfers tied
up phone lines for hours on end and filled up the small disks we had.
While there is plenty not to like about the way copyright law works,
that doesn't mean you get to ignore it.
Once people started to get dialup or direct
connections to the Internet, they had a lot better ways to download
binary stuff than multipart uuencoded news messages.
I realize that conspiracy theories are more fun, but sometimes
life is boring and practical.
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
There are indeed organized groups of peoople who are trying to trade
CSAM and will use your service to do it if you let them, and there's
real abuse of real people underneath it.
So you put in the effort to *solve* that problem, not sweep it under the
rug, which is all you accomplish when you start deleting data.
My point is always going to come back to the fact that few people are actually interested in solving abuse on *any* platform.
But it’s worse than that! It’s gone the other way: cloud platforms have business models where the profit motive is in *supporting* that evil
shit.
John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
While there is plenty not to like about the way copyright law works,
that doesn't mean you get to ignore it.
Neither do lawyers get to ignore the realities of math. And math always wins, because it isn’t fabricated the way laws are.
What killed Usenet is that it wasn’t practical any longer. No grand conspiracies from me. People simply wanted binaries, even if only to
share family photos and pet videos. When they got a “no”, they didn’t even care that you were hiding behind your lawyers and suggesting they
might be thieves, they just heard the “no” and left.
John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
According to Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com>:
In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are
disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden >> >to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to use it to
their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and destroyed it.
Hi, I've managed news servers since the 1980s. I never carried many of
the binary newsgoups for entirely practical reasons. They were (and
are) enormous which in the era of slow, often dialup, transfers tied
up phone lines for hours on end and filled up the small disks we had.
That simply speaks to the problem if scaling the network, which has
nothing to do with any particular data format or content. If store-and-forward is the wrong solution, what is the right solution?
What about a caching proxy for just-in-time delivery of messages?
It’s kinda moot to have this discussion now, though, because we’ve had
20 years of alternative protocols establishing themselves.
I realize that conspiracy theories are more fun, but sometimes
life is boring and practical.
What killed Usenet is that it wasn’t practical any longer. No grand conspiracies from me. People simply wanted binaries, even if only to
share family photos and pet videos. When they got a “no”, they didn’t even care that you were hiding behind your lawyers and suggesting they
might be thieves, they just heard the “no” and left. If you want them
to return, you have to formulate a more practical answer than “still
no”.
But if you mean the cloud providers are happy about or actively encourage people doing evil shit like CSAM on their platforms, this is absolutely
100% not true and I know it's not true from direct personal experience.
Cloud platforms spend large quantities of money, hire whole teams of very expensive people, and write whole new algorithms and scanning methods to
try to get rid of shit like CSAM. It's a significant expense; it is absolutely not a profit center. They do that in part because people who
work for cloud platforms are human and have normal human feelings about
CSAM, in part because it's a public relations nightmare, and in part
because not doing some parts of that work is illegal.
Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
According to Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com>: >>>> In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are
disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden >>>> to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to use it to >>>> their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and destroyed it.
Hi, I've managed news servers since the 1980s. I never carried many of
the binary newsgoups for entirely practical reasons. They were (and
are) enormous which in the era of slow, often dialup, transfers tied
up phone lines for hours on end and filled up the small disks we had.
Like John, when I was operating NNTP service for anyone other than
myself, we excluded binaries because they were too expensive to
carry. The CSAM risk was mitigated by subscribing to a service which
notified us of illegal material so we could delete it.
Text groups carried legal risks too, at the time, but that didn’t stop
us carrying text Usenet.
Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.
Am 20.07.2023 um 13:24:19 Uhr schrieb Jesse Rehmer:
I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet >>providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
near the NSA.
Is there a specific (legal) reason for that?
Maybe you aren't aware but numerous claims have been made over the years about service providers profiting from CSAM specifically, including a
Usenet Service Provider whom straddles both sides of profit and
cooperation with law enforcement.
https://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm
Indeed, fighting spam and abuse is a daily challenge.
And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia"
and "hard for new users to find it" problems.
I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
near the NSA.
I was not directly involved, but worked on the Hosting help desk while
this was ongoing, and know that we had the knowledge, capabilities, and
man power to shut them all off within a few hours, but the higher ups
let it drag out for a year or more before finally terminating
contracts. It wasn't until it started to hit the news and they began receiving external pressure that they changed their tune, and very
slowly terminated the bad actors. I realize this is not exactly the same scenario as CSAM, but I've witnessed decisions made at executive levels
that chose profits over doing what is legal or right.
Service Providers in the USA have immense protections, perhaps a lot
more than they should, and we're going through another phase where that
is being re-examined and up for litigation. Having been somewhat of a man-in-the-middle of all things related to Internet and Society - I'm
not exactly sure where I stand on most of it either.
Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
Maybe you aren't aware but numerous claims have been made over the years
about service providers profiting from CSAM specifically, including a
Usenet Service Provider whom straddles both sides of profit and
cooperation with law enforcement.
https://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm
I should be clear: I am not saying that absolutely no service provider anywhere has ever decided to try to profit from CSAM. Obviously I can't
make a claim like that, particularly given that 8chan and company exists.
I personally know nothing about Giganews and would be a fool to comment.
The world is large and full of people. I'm sure just about every awful
thing anyone can think of has been attempted by someone at one point or another.
My point is only that the idea that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta,
Apple, etc. (the companies that most people think of when someone says
"cloud provider" which was the term used in the message I was replying to) have a business model built on CSAM is directly contradicted by the very
real and large expenditures by those same companies to try to get that
stuff off their platforms as much as they possibly can given other constraints they have around promises of user privacy, etc.
The shape of their problem is instead that they have been wildly
successful beyond any of their reasonable expectations and with that level
of scale comes a level of platform abuse that they were wholly unprepared originally to deal with. They're still desperately digging themselves out
of that hole and occasionally falling into it again. But if they could somehow make the problem go away, they would *love* to do so.
One tension they have is that a lot of people also (quite understandably) feel pretty weird, at best, about their cloud provider saying "oh, we're going to scan everything you do to see if any of it would be of interest
to the cops," which means they would strongly prefer to be reactive rather than proactive, but some of these groups are quite sophisticated and find
new ways of hiding from reactive scanning techniques. Another tension
they have is that in a lot of cases they would like to promise end-to-end user privacy because it's a selling point, but end-to-end user privacy
from the cloud provider means they by definition cannot scan or do
anything else about whatever is crossing that channel, so they end up in a three way fight between privacy advocates, the government, and the news media. (And, to be clear, usually manage to say the stupidest possible things and step on five rakes in the process.)
It's an incredibly tricky area and I certainly don't have all of the right answers. All I know is that (a) Usenet is a hobby for me and I'm not
going near this mess with a ten foot pole and would strongly recommend against anyone else doing so either unless you have the money for lawyers
and a real anti-abuse team, and (b) the idea that cloud providers in
general benefit from CSAM seems like bullshit to me given the amount of
money they spend on trying to get rid of it and trying to control the
public relations fallout from the bits they didn't manage to get rid of.
Even if the balance of money is slightly towards profit (which I highly doubt), it's UTTERLY dwarfed by their legitimate business and directly threatens it, so it is certainly not a motivating force for the typical
cloud provider.
Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
I was not directly involved, but worked on the Hosting help desk while
this was ongoing, and know that we had the knowledge, capabilities, and
man power to shut them all off within a few hours, but the higher ups
let it drag out for a year or more before finally terminating
contracts. It wasn't until it started to hit the news and they began
receiving external pressure that they changed their tune, and very
slowly terminated the bad actors. I realize this is not exactly the same
scenario as CSAM, but I've witnessed decisions made at executive levels
that chose profits over doing what is legal or right.
Service Providers in the USA have immense protections, perhaps a lot
more than they should, and we're going through another phase where that
is being re-examined and up for litigation. Having been somewhat of a
man-in-the-middle of all things related to Internet and Society - I'm
not exactly sure where I stand on most of it either.
Yeah, this is all very fair and I agree with everything you say here. The smaller the provider, the more likely that the response to platlform abuse will be... shall we say, random. Some companies will take immediate
action; some companies will avoid doing anything for as long as possible.
Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I think in *most* cases the lack of
action is some combination of the fact that dealing with this stuff
requires spending money that doesn't make any profits and small companies
are more likely to feel like this is unfair and be very grudging about
doing it, plus the general human tendency to believe that any problem that one doesn't want to deal with can't possibly be as bad as people claim it
is. I think actual malice is rather rare, but cutting corners and not spending money where it seems avoidable is very common.
There are also, of course, folks with strong libertarian principles,
probably more common among the sort of folks who often start small businesses, and as long as the argument feels like it's on the level of abstract principles, it's easy to decide that the libertarian principles should win. (Again, maybe I'm too optimistic, but I don't think this
tends to survive direct contact with the worst types of platform abuse.
But thankfully that sort of abuse is relatively rare, so the debate
sometimes stays abstract for a long time.)
The larger companies do not have the luxury of ignoring this sort of
problem and already have frequent contact with law enforcement due to the simple fact that people live large amounts of their lives on cloud
providers these days, so legal investigations constantly go there.
They're more likely to have thought somewhat seriously about this and have employees whose job it is to figure out what to do, although even in those cases they tend to be underresourced compared to the size of the problem.
There are far cheaper geographical locations in the USA to obtain
reliable power, IP/transit, and secure raised floor space than Ashburn
VA.
Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
There are far cheaper geographical locations in the USA to obtain
reliable power, IP/transit, and secure raised floor space than Ashburn
VA.
There are a lot of good reasons to put your stuff there that were even stronger a decade or more ago when a lot of those hosting decisions were made. There are really good reasons why Amazon's us-east-1 region and
their original S3 storage was there, entirely technical reasons.
Some of them:
1. It's no longer the cheapest region for power, etc., but it is still
very cheap, particularly compared to, say, New York or New Jersey.
2. It's very close to where most of the people in the United States live,
which matters a lot for latency.
3. Huge amounts of legacy infrastructure is based there, going all the way
back to ARPANET, so it's very easy to get peering (this is changing
over time).
4. It's physically close to Wall Street, which is a huge central point for
network infrastructure, without actually being in Wall Street and
having to pay the costs designed for algorithmic trading.
It was only very recently that Amazon started pushing us-east-2 in Ohio,
and basically everyone in the first round of businesses that hosted on AWS have significant infrastructure in us-east-1.
I think people reach a little too far for conspiracy theories about stuff like this. The reason why the national government, Wall Street, the CIA
and NSA, the FBI, a bunch of network infrastructure, tons of ISPs, and
tons of servers are all in the same place is because that's where all the people lived in the early United States and therefore that's where all the cities were and it's still where the major population centers of the
United States cluster. Obviously, California, Texas, and Florida are changing that, but there's a ton of momentum behind those patterns and I believe the imbalance of US residents towards the eastern time zone is
still quite large.
Virginia actively tried to be the cheap state close enough to all the expensive states but far enough away that you're not paying the expensive state premium, and that worked really well for them.
Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
Am 20.07.2023 um 13:24:19 Uhr schrieb Jesse Rehmer:
I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet
providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
near the NSA.
Is there a specific (legal) reason for that?
Lots of communications infrastructure and power to serve Fort Meade?
Seems like the right place to site a server farm.
Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense
that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia
and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what
happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the
Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full
feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there
is based on common financial benefit of them all living/exchanging the
feed there than dispersed over transit providers.
So, there's this really common phenomenon in economics where certain
places become the center of a particular type of industry for reasons that >aren't really obvious. Usually there's *some* initial impetus, but it's >often minor and doesn't explain the level of concentration. (For
instance, for Virginia, doubtless it got a head start because of ARPANET.) >For example, why are all the movie studios in Los Angeles, or all the tech >companies in San Francisco and San Jose (and now Seattle and Austin, but >still not, say, San Antonio or Phoenix), or all the banks in New York?
. . .
However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense
that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia
and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what
happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the
Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full
feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there
is based on common financial benefit of them all living/exchanging the
feed there than dispersed over transit providers.
Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense
that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia
and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what
happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the
Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full
feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there
is based on common financial benefit of them all living/exchanging the
feed there than dispersed over transit providers.
So, there's this really common phenomenon in economics where certain
places become the center of a particular type of industry for reasons that aren't really obvious. Usually there's *some* initial impetus, but it's often minor and doesn't explain the level of concentration. (For
instance, for Virginia, doubtless it got a head start because of ARPANET.) For example, why are all the movie studios in Los Angeles, or all the tech companies in San Francisco and San Jose (and now Seattle and Austin, but still not, say, San Antonio or Phoenix), or all the banks in New York?
Standard economic theory says that a lot of this is due to network
effects. Once there is an industry concentration in an area, it tends to become more concentrated because it's just so convenient. In northern Virginia, there are a bunch of well-established data facility companies
that know how to run data facilities and are competing with each other.
There is a huge trained local population of data center workers so it's
easy to hire techs. All the local power equipment and installation
companies do data center work so they're good at it. There are a bunch of local HVAC companies that know how to cool data centers. There's a big
Dell service center right there to repair your servers and they have all
the parts. All the servers are already there so the transatlantic cables terminate there because why not. Etc.
If you start out as some small business back in the day when that meant physical servers (these days, everyone just starts on AWS or GCS or
Azure), you probably want those servers close by because you're going
there yourself to fix them. So you start with some local hosting provider wherever you are physically located.
But then if you succeed and grow, suppose that you want to provide a high-bandwidth service, and you want it to be low latency for the majority
of the US population while still having reasonable latency to Europe and
the rest of the US. Where do you rent a data center? You're a US company and don't want to deal with international corporate law, so Toronto is
out. What are the other options?
Virginia looks really good, and ten years ago looked even better. That's where all the expertise is, it's centrally located for both the US and Europe, there's a lot of market competition so you can shop around, it's close to all the peering... looks great. Sure, you can probably get
cheaper buildings in, oh, Charleston, South Carolina or Louisville,
Kentucky or whatever, but that supporting network of specialization isn't there. You could go to Miami, but that's both probably not cheap and also you have to worry about hurricane-related disruptions. You could do Pittsburgh, or Ohio, or whatever, but Virginia is really appealing.
However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense that >commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia and migrated >elsewhere, versus the other way around, which ...
Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.
I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet providers >in the United States - their servers and infrastructure handling Usenet feeds >are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities near the NSA.
Am 20.07.2023 um 13:24:19 Uhr schrieb Jesse Rehmer:
I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet
providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
near the NSA.
Is there a specific (legal) reason for that?
It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.
There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
court cases on this very topic.
I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet providers
in the United States - their servers and infrastructure handling Usenet feeds
are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities near the NSA.
The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?
Re that decaode old web page claiming they're an FBI front, if you read
it with your brain turned on it was clear that they were doing something
with the FBI to try and catch people distributing CSAM, which is not the
same thing as being an FBI front.
The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't
looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?
From https://giganews.com/peering:
We will only exchange full binary feeds with peers who enter into settlement >free network peering with us. We are currently able to peer in the following >facilities:
Equinix, Ashburn, VA (ASN 30094) – direct cross-connect required
AMS-IX, Amsterdam, NL (ASN 30094)
It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't
looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?
From https://giganews.com/peering:
We will only exchange full binary feeds with peers who enter into settlement >> free network peering with us. We are currently able to peer in the following >> facilities:
Equinix, Ashburn, VA (ASN 30094) – direct cross-connect required
AMS-IX, Amsterdam, NL (ASN 30094)
For reasons everyeone else has explained, it's not surprising they
have a point of presence in Ashburn, since that's where everyone else
is and it is a whole lot cheaper to peer with a bunch of people at an
IX than one at a time with separate links.
But the company is mostly in Texas and always has been.
Re that decaode old web page claiming they're an FBI front, if you
read it with your brain turned on it was clear that they were doing
something with the FBI to try and catch people distributing CSAM,
which is not the same thing as being an FBI front. Again, considering
how big they are, it's not very surprising the FBI would ask them to
do that.
Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose
profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and
pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which
the US government semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?
Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose
profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and
pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which
the US government semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?
The NSA and their peers are quite capable of taking an NNTP feed like
anyone else, why would they care about the location of other Usenet providers?
Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how >>> they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.
There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
court cases on this very topic.
"Richard Kettlewell" <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose
profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and
pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which
the US government semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?
The NSA and their peers are quite capable of taking an NNTP feed like
anyone else, why would they care about the location of other Usenet
providers?
Why would they trust anyone to hand them a potentially filtered feed
for surveillance?
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
Standing in court yelling MATH WILL ALWAYS WIN is very emotionally
satisfying, but weirdly it doesn't make the court judgment go away.
Maybe the lawyers won't be able to ignore the realities of math
forever, but they do in fact get to ignore the realities of math long
enough to tell the men with guns to go take your money.
That’s a nice straw man scenario, but it bears no relation to the argument I was making. Laws are but one means to an end, and bad laws do *not* do what they’re supposed to be doing (and fuel the conspiracy theories that their “unintended consequences” were actually intended the whole time).
Regardless, my point remains that people wanted a “one stop shop” for their group chat messages, which were increasingly becoming non-text. Binaries being segregated like they are is both inconvenient and made
them easy to drop completely.
What killed Usenet was that it had no solution for spam that actually
worked for the average person, only complicated and weird filtering
experiments that never quite worked right.
There isn’t a single platform without spam problems, so it is ludicrous to suggest that people abandoned Usenet for some spam-free social network.
Even so, there were tools that could have been brought to bear to
greatly reduce the problem (Hello, UDP!), and I can only speculate on
why the abuse wasn’t policed (insert your favorite conspiracy theory
here).
Yep, and that’s why it was a mistake to not actually solve those
problems decades ago.
Standing in court yelling MATH WILL ALWAYS WIN is very emotionally satisfying, but weirdly it doesn't make the court judgment go away. Maybe the lawyers won't be able to ignore the realities of math forever, but
they do in fact get to ignore the realities of math long enough to tell
the men with guns to go take your money.
This is a bizarrely confused history of Usenet. The binary groups were
going strong for years after the text groups were dying.
What killed
Usenet was that it had no solution for spam that actually worked for the average person, only complicated and weird filtering experiments that
never quite worked right.
Spoiler: Still has exactly the same problems. Usenet is just too dead for spammers to care about it (mostly). If it were ever revived, the same problem would immediately come back.
However, I personally would rather juggle raw plutonium than spend any
time handling that kind of legal evidence and therefore opt out of the
entire problem by not carrying binaries, since otherwise I am legally obligated to spend whatever time it takes me to handle that data properly should any problem arise.
Since personally I don't care about any of the
binaries anyway (there are numerous better sources for any non-textual information I want than Usenet)
You
would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear, and, well, good luck with that.
You can do various things to make it easier and various things to make it harder. One of the most effective things you can do to make dealing with abuse easier is to ban all non-textual media, because that takes a lot of
the most annoying, dangerous, or horrific types of abuse off the table.
I wanted to say that this is definitely not true, but I think I can see
how one might see that this is true from a particular angle. It is true
that in pursuit of profits, a bunch of companies have built network
platforms that make abuse much easier, and are now desperately trying to
play catch-up to filter out the shit that they don't want to carry.
But if you mean the cloud providers are happy about or actively encourage people doing evil shit like CSAM on their platforms, this is absolutely
100% not true and I know it's not true from direct personal experience.
Cloud platforms spend large quantities of money, hire whole teams of very expensive people, and write whole new algorithms and scanning methods to
try to get rid of shit like CSAM.
... Usenet had a mostly working way of dealing with that and was
still going very strong with widely-used text discussion groups
until the spamming (and off-topic trolling and other types of
unwanted messages that are even harder to moderate) took off.
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
You would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear,
and, well, good luck with that.
We must be on different Internets. The one I’m on doesn’t have “opponents”. It has connections between myself and other people I want to engage with. What the hell kind of network have you set up for
yourself that maintains connections to people who are out to do you
harm?
But if you mean the cloud providers are happy about or actively
encourage people doing evil shit like CSAM on their platforms, this is
absolutely 100% not true and I know it's not true from direct personal
experience.
My personal experience says otherwise. Nobody is kicking their paying customers to the curb unless they’re forced to.
And you focus on "spam" in your further comments in the quoted post,
while I think these "off-topic trolling and other types of unwanted
messages that are even harder to moderate" is actually more on the mark.
The general anti-social behavior.
... the Usenet protocol and the lack of any central point of control
makes it rather challenging.
I never found spam per se to be that big of an issue on Usenet --
Before I go back to lurking, if only for others reading this, perhaps
it's worth pointing out that what brought someone like me to Usenet
(in the mid-80s) is exactly what amplifies these social issues:
Aggregation. So it's great when it's possible to draw from specialists >around the world in order to discuss a topic.... But we're "drawing
from" all the sociopaths out there too [...]
... the whole moderation infrastructure on usenet appears to have
fallen into disarray from lack of use.
You don't seem to understand my point. This whole thread started with talking about news administration and with you being upset that people
aren't carrying binaries. The point that I and several other people are making is that carrying binaries creates legal hassles. Now you're saying the laws are bad.
The laws may or may not be bad, but my point is that it doesn't matter.
The people enforcing the laws do not give a single shit what your opinion,
or my opinion, of the laws are. All of these arguments about whether the laws work or not are therefore entirely beside the point. I think use of
at least some currently illegal drugs should be legalized and a lot of
drug laws are very bad and counterproductive; that doesn't mean I'm going
to start selling drugs while drugs are illegal.
The laws are a constraint on how people run their servers (this is sort of the definition of laws). If you think the laws should change so that carrying binaries wouldn't pose legal risk, go get them changed and then
let us know.
Regardless, my point remains that people wanted a “one stop shop” for their group chat messages, which were increasingly becoming non-text. Binaries being segregated like they are is both inconvenient and made
them easy to drop completely.
Sure. I agree with that. What I'm pointing out is *why* they were segregated and why to this day you're going to have an extremely hard time convincing anyone who doesn't have a lot of resources and a legal and anti-abuse team to unsegregate them, or carry them at all.
I also disagree that this is what killed Usenet in large part because the phenomenon you describe about wanting non-text messages is newer than when Usenet started running into trouble.
But I'm dubious that it was *primarily* about non-text content because of
the timing.
some sites that were sources of significant percentages of
the wanted articles were also sources of significant amounts of spam and there was no consensus to cut them off
The same mechanism that was used for UDPs was also then used for denial of service attacks, making it hard to run a service with those mechanisms enabled, and no one managed to get an authenticated protocol really
working, in part due to the constant disagreement over who should have the right to moderate Usenet.
Yep, and that’s why it was a mistake to not actually solve those
problems decades ago.
I would also like to have cold fusion and perfectly efficient solar
panels. Doing spam control in a highly distributed system with no central authority in the face of active harassment is very hard!
Doing it with
almost no income stream to pay people is nearly impossible.
Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
You would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear,
and, well, good luck with that.
We must be on different Internets. The one I’m on doesn’t have “opponents”. It has connections between myself and other people I want to engage with. What the hell kind of network have you set up for
yourself that maintains connections to people who are out to do you
harm?
Uh... Usenet? Usenet is that network? This is the entire way that it
works? People post articles that are flood-filled through a network?
They are therefore present on servers with no direct connection with the person who posted it?
The whole point of Usenet is to talk about things with strangers.
Protocols for talking to strangers are inherently vulnerable to abusive strangers and thus tend to have serious problems unless they're moderated
in some fashion. This is, like, social media 101. If I were only
connecting to people I want to engage with, I wouldn't have any of your articles and we wouldn't be having this discussion. :)
More generally, this is inherently the challenge of *any* form of
community forum or commons. If something is intended to be open to
everyone by default unless they have done something wrong, some number of those people will try to use it to do harm, and then one has to build some sort of system that prevents or mitigates that harm by filtering it out or removing those people. This is *inherently unavoidable*, and it's also *inherently adversarial*.
Whatever moderation system you build will be
tested by people who are trying to bypass it. And it's far more
challenging to write those systems on the internet where there is no
single authentication system (which would be bad to have for other
reasons, anyway) and it is trivially easy to create new identities.
My personal experience says otherwise. Nobody is kicking their paying customers to the curb unless they’re forced to.
Okay, well, this makes it clear to me that you have absolutely no idea
what you're talking about and are just making things up based on your own prejudices. So probably much to everyone else's relief, I'll try to stop responding here, and you can have the last words.
Usenet’s answer to that was, at first, “No, if you want to talk about cars
you go to this one group, but if you want to post a picture of a cool car
you saw at a show, you have to go to this other group (never mind the whole process of uploading and downloading) that has none of the conversation context. Oh, you have a *video* of the car, well now you need to go to an even *different* group and discover how much more of a pain large files are!” Then even that option went away.
GigaNews's AS and associated prefixes are currently only announced from Deft's
network (out of Chicago from my perspective) and the two IXs in Ashburn VA and
Frankfurt Germany. It seems very recently they lost many IP peers and prefix announcements, but maybe they sold off old parts of the business unrelated to GigaNews. From a network/service provider perspective, they are the most opaque of the bunch operating in the USA in terms of exactly how they operate,
and they haven't answered an e-mail sent to their peering address in over 4 years from myself and other operators I am in contact with attempting to peer or adjust feeds with them.
Hi Jesse,
GigaNews's AS and associated prefixes are currently only announced from Deft's
network (out of Chicago from my perspective) and the two IXs in Ashburn VA and
Frankfurt Germany. It seems very recently they lost many IP peers and prefix >> announcements, but maybe they sold off old parts of the business unrelated to
GigaNews. From a network/service provider perspective, they are the most
opaque of the bunch operating in the USA in terms of exactly how they operate,
and they haven't answered an e-mail sent to their peering address in over 4 >> years from myself and other operators I am in contact with attempting to peer
or adjust feeds with them.
Strange that the Giganews folks don't even bother responding to their
peers who ask them some feed adjustement. They claim to have a 24/7
support team... but not for their peers! Maybe they should be contacted
via their support team instead of their peering address?
FWIW, in relation with this thread, they are using a special 451 NNTP >response code when an article cannot be found because it was removed as
part of a DMCA request:
https://support.giganews.com/hc/en-us/articles/9952660678285-What-are-errors-430-and-451-
This discussion is pretty interesting, and helped in improving my
knowledge of the states and cities of the USA :)
--
Julien ÉLIE
« – Connaissez-vous la différence entre l'ignorance et l'apathie ?
– J'en sais rien et je m'en fous. »
I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, excepting to have a technical discussion on what it will take to turn Usenet into a
modern service.
I think it's a damn fool idea to flood the same 200MB video to 1,000 different Usenet servers on the off chance that somebody might be
reading alt.cars.ford.edsel and wants to watch it.
Makes a lot more
sense to post a link, be it to Youtube or some other hosting option (self-hosted if you're bold). If one wishes to be a grumpy protocol contrarian there's no reason it has to be an HTTP link either, by all
means go wild and use FTP or gopher or 9p or *something* that makes more sense for distributing large files than the Net News Transport
Protocol.
Your vaunted web forums usually don't host their own images or videos
either, or if they do host images they are much restricted (1 image per
post, max 200KB, only viewable by signed-in members etc.)
For your reference, records indicate that
John <john@building-m.simplistic-anti-spam-measure.net> wrote:
I think it's a damn fool idea to flood the same 200MB video to 1,000
different Usenet servers on the off chance that somebody might be
reading alt.cars.ford.edsel and wants to watch it.
I agree. As I have said in other posts, it points to the fact that >store-and-forward is no longer a practical way to build a distributed >network. It may have made sense in the early days of Usenet when
reliable connectivity wasn’t a given. We’re at least a decade past when >that was the norm.
I still don’t understand why people act like NNTP cannot be updated to something that actually supports “links” internally. I mean, really, all we’re talking about here is the idea that a server can refer to a message ID that it may not be able to provide. If it simply tracked a “source” server, it could either then later store-and-forward on request, or
instruct the client to directly fetch it from that server itself.
I’m all ears for better solutions than that, too. What I’m tired of hearing is “Oh, Usenet didn’t do that in 1998, so it can’t be done.”
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